In an older telephone network, a calling party must know the telephone number of the telephone associated with the called party. When the calling party does not know the telephone number, the calling party can contact directory assistance to get the number.
Newer telecommunications networks, such as Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (“VoIP”) networks, can be based on the Session Initiation Protocol, or “SIP,” which handles the call control. In such a network, when a calling party's “home” Session Initiation Protocol proxy server receives a request for a called party whose information is not known to the home proxy server, it forwards the request to another proxy server referred to as the “edge” proxy server. The edge proxy server uses a similar mechanism as used by the home proxy server, in order to route the request to the next segment of the network.
In the mechanisms used by these proxy servers in the prior art, the number of segments that it takes for a request to get from the calling party to the called party is fixed. Each segment is associated with a certain amount of processing. The processing typically includes message reception, message parsing, message validation, transaction management, authentication, authorization, location service lookup, and so forth. The processing that is associated with each segment, when added together for all of the segments traversed because of the request, can equate to a significant amount of processing.
For this reason, the need exists for an improvement in the operation of Session Initiation Protocol-based networks, as well as similar networks.